Run Inbox Triage during Daily Check-in, on its own whenever new emails arrive during the day, or before weekly planning when inbox work may affect your capacity.
Work OS · Work Compass · Workflow
I want to know which inbox emails need work without turning triage into a second inbox
When new emails arrive, Inbox Triage helps you decide what needs attention without turning email review into another inbox.
The job this workflow helps me complete
Make the next email decision visible.
When new emails arrive, Inbox Triage helps you decide what needs attention without turning email review into another inbox. Before Inbox Triage, you have to open and interpret each email yourself. After it runs, emails are classified, summarized, and given a clear work signal, so you can move the right follow-up forward without spending your working time reading everything in depth.
Prompt examples
Use any of these phrases to start this workflow.
run workflow Inbox Triagerun Inbox Triagetriage my inbox
You need one connected inbox source and the inbox settings that define its classifications, work signals, relationships, and review preferences.
Inbox Triage does not archive, delete, trash, send, or schedule emails. Those decisions remain with you and with the later closure workflows.
What the workflow does
From new email to approved follow-up.
Inbox Triage normally runs as part of Daily Check-in. You can also run it on its own several times during the day. For example, after lunch, you can run Inbox Triage alone to process new emails without repeating the rest of your daily review.
It reads a bounded set of emails, proposes three kinds of context for each one, and presents the results for your correction and approval:
- Email classification: what the email is about, such as business, personal, finance, administration, technology, marketing, newsletter, notification, noise, or unknown.
- Work signal: what deserves your attention next.
- Relationship: who the sender is in relation to your work, such as a lead, customer, supplier, partner, team member, community contact, service provider, personal contact, or unknown.
After approval, Inbox Triage applies the agreed labels to the inbox, marks successfully labeled emails as read, and provides a quick capture of the work that needs to be done. The follow-up can then be tracked in your To-Do List or from the Needs Reply and Needs Action labels in the inbox.
How this workflow is built
Three layers of context, one approval point.
Inbox Triage gives each email three separate layers of context.
Email classification
The classification tells you what kind of email you are looking at. It separates business correspondence from personal emails, financial items, administration, technology, marketing, newsletters, notifications, noise, and emails that remain unknown.
This makes the inbox easier to review by subject and domain. An email can be classified as business without automatically becoming urgent, and a personal email can still require a reply.
Work signal
The work signal tells you what deserves attention next:
- Needs Reply: you need to respond to the email.
- Needs Action: you need to do something beyond replying.
- Review Later: the email is worth returning to, but does not need attention now.
- No Action: nothing needs to happen.
- Uncertain: the evidence is incomplete or conflicting, so the email stays visible for your judgment.
Work signals separate the email’s subject from its consequence. A newsletter may be classified as a newsletter and receive Review Later. A customer email may be classified as business and receive Needs Reply. A known sender does not automatically make an email urgent.
Inbox Triage lets you move quickly through the inbox without reading every email in depth. Emails that need a reply or action are summarized with the context needed to decide what happens next. The remaining emails are grouped as No Action, Review Later, or Uncertain, so they do not compete with the work that needs your attention now.
Relationship
The relationship gives sender context. It helps Work Compass recognize whether an email comes from a lead, customer, partner, supplier, team member, community contact, service provider, personal contact, or someone unknown.
Activating relationships is worth doing when you want more consistent triage. If Work Compass knows that a sender is a customer or team member, it can use that context when interpreting the email. Relationship context does not decide the classification or work signal by itself. A customer can send an informational update, while an unknown sender can still send an email with a real deadline.
Key steps and decisions
Move from scan to a deliberate follow-up path.
- 01
Scan new email.
Inbox Triage reviews the emails that arrived since the last completed triage.
- 02
Review the important emails first.
You receive summaries of emails that appear to need a reply or action, including enough context to decide what to do. Other emails are already grouped as No Action, Review Later, or Uncertain.
- 03
Choose where follow-up lives.
Needs Reply and Needs Action emails are proposed for the To-Do List by default. The To-Do item remains associated with the email, so you can bring the original context back when you work on it. You can keep working from the inbox labels, use the associated To-Do item, or route a Needs Action email to Focus Work when it needs protected time, such as a 30-minute block or a longer work session.
- 04
Approve and verify.
Once you approve the proposed labels and follow-up routes, Inbox Triage applies the approved labels to the inbox, marks successfully labeled emails as read, and verifies the result. It does not archive the email.
- 05
Return to your work.
You leave triage with a clear follow-up path and a reusable handoff for Daily Check-in, planning, or later inbox cleanup. The next triage starts after the last completed review.
The output: what happens and where it goes
What happens and where it goes.
| Output | What happens | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox triage result | Saves the approved classifications, relationships, work signals, review decisions, verification, and planning handoff | Work Compass inbox logs: Outputs/logs/compass-inbox/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM-[source-id]-triage.md |
| Follow-up route | Needs Reply and Needs Action emails are proposed for the To-Do List by default; the item remains associated with the email, while a Needs Action email can instead go to Focus Work or remain in the inbox | Shared To-Do List, Focus Work, or the email inbox |
| Archive decision | No archive action is taken during Inbox Triage | Deferred to Daily Close or Week Closer |